Performance per watt on the 7850 is unbelievable. Hell, you can crossfire them on a 500 watt power supply! That would make it hard to pass up for me but, there is something about having a big juicy card i.e. GTX570.

I've been looking at the 7850/7870 pretty hard this week myself. Pretty attractive at its price point.

Quote:

Originally Posted by onoz

If your friend is thinking of crossfiring later, he should get the 7870 now. If he gets the 7850 now, and a 7870 later, they'll both run at 7850 speeds (i.e., the 7870 will downclock to 7850 speeds), so there'll be no point.

I'd also like to point out that this is a misconception. This was ONLY the case with 4xxx series cards, and that was quite a while ago. The only thing that takes a hit is the memory bandwidth because the cards need to be mirrored, a 7870+7850 will nearly always be faster than 7850x2 assuming the drivers work properly (don't hold your breath).

non OC version (sapphire one) of HD 7870 is around 80-100$ more than the OCed version of HD 7850...plus i had a long discussion with others about whether getting i5 2500k or bulldozer as i5 seems to be expensive as well...so my choice is, whether buy a good card now or good cpu now.

I've been looking at the 7850/7870 pretty hard this week myself. Pretty attractive at its price point.

Quote:

Originally Posted by onoz

If your friend is thinking of crossfiring later, he should get the 7870 now. If he gets the 7850 now, and a 7870 later, they'll both run at 7850 speeds (i.e., the 7870 will downclock to 7850 speeds), so there'll be no point.

I'd also like to point out that this is a misconception. This was ONLY the case with 4xxx series cards, and that was quite a while ago. The only thing that takes a hit is the memory bandwidth because the cards need to be mirrored, a 7870+7850 will nearly always be faster than 7850x2 assuming the drivers work properly (don't hold your breath).